No place like home: Romney scapegoat wins in Miss.

The novel’s plot is now almost eerily prescient: A cynical Republican consultant returns to his native Mississippi to run a slash-and-burn campaign, grappling with cartoonish scandals and echoes of his childhood in the civil rights era. In the end, an aging political throwback — a genteel ex-governor — lands a place in the U.S. Senate.

Stuart Stevens wrote the satirical book, “Scorched Earth,” in 1994. In 2014, he practically lived it.

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The former senior strategist for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, Stevens decamped this spring to Mississippi to help steer Sen. Thad Cochran through a trying reelection fight. Settling in a hotel a few miles from the home on Jackson’s Piedmont Street where he grew up, the Republican operative became a mercurial presence around the race. An ad-maker by trade, Stevens popped up on Cochran’s campaign bus, near the senator’s side during a predawn stop at the Ingalls shipyard, on the sidelines of a Chris McDaniel event featuring Romney’s old nemesis, Rick Santorum.

His first major political undertaking since the devastation of losing a presidential race, the Cochran campaign was more than just any old election for Stevens. For a consultant who cultivates a man-of-mystery aura, known for being an accomplished world traveler and literary jack of all trades, the campaign was also a homecoming.

Stevens, 61, declined three times to discuss the personal resonance of the Cochran campaign prior to Tuesday, when the incumbent defeated McDaniel by fewer than 7,000 votes. Two days after the vote, he called up and offered to talk — about what the race meant to Mississippi, to the Republican Party and to him personally.

In an hourlong phone interview, Stevens said he grew passionately invested in the Cochran-McDaniel race as a contest between Mississippi’s past and its future. He described it not as a generational fight between two politicians, but a struggle against forces of anger that have stained Mississippi’s history.

“To me, it would have been a tragedy if Thad had lost the primary,” said Stevens, who remembers knocking on doors for Cochran’s first House race in 1972. “I was a page for the congressman before him. I remember him, still, when he was a civic leader — you know, back in the days when there was so much racial trouble and he was always a voice of calm.”

The importance of Thad Cochran, he said, is “hard for people not from Mississippi to understand.”

“At a time when a lot of people were trying to get elected appealing to our worst instincts, Thad never did,” Stevens said. “His opponent’s style just didn’t wear well with people. I think when you start angry and the only thing you have left is to get more angry, it wears on people. You just seem angry and not to a particular purpose.”

If Stevens ever fit the profile of a stereotypical Deep South political consultant, a lot of time has passed since then. A sometime screenwriter with an obsessive athletic streak — he chose his Mississippi hotel due to the proximity of running trails and a CrossFit location — he has authored books about trekking across China and blazing a trail through the high-end restaurants of Europe. A big-picture strategist who made his national reputation writing TV ad scripts, Stevens is known among his peers as an enthusiastic raconteur who will rarely answer with a declarative sentence when a rambling yarn will do.

In one Stevens travelogue, the Africa-based “Malaria Dreams,” the narrator plainly channels Stevens’ own childhood wanderlust, recalling “long games of kick the can and capture the flag in Mississippi, when I’d hide in the darkness and dream of the time I could leave and go to the places I read about every afternoon in the coolness of the air-conditioned Jackson Public Library.”

But Stevens’ Mississippi roots run too deep to leave behind entirely, and after 2012 he returned to them with new intensity.

He is adamant that his commitment to the Mississippi race wasn’t any kind of penance for the failure of Romney’s presidential campaign. Stevens, who drew furious criticism for Romney’s hidebound general-election strategy, said he feels no sense of vindication from the results in Mississippi. “It doesn’t make Mitt Romney president,” he said. “I’m glad that Thad Cochran won. But as far as proving anything — it doesn’t make Mitt Romney president.”

Still, his journey back to Mississippi has at least something to do with Romney. The loss in 2012 left the strategist disoriented and dismayed. Reeling, he took a year off from politics, spending his time instead by biking across the United States, traveling to the north of Sweden (a friend has “sort of a Stieg Larsson cabin” there) and reconnecting with Mississippi.